Last week, the US government lifted its previous ban and formally approved the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips, along with AMD’s chip line, to approved Chinese customers. Perhaps they aren’t the brightest, most cutting-edge chips from these chipmakers, but their exports are controversial because they are high-performance processors used for AI. And at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei blamed both the government and semiconductor companies for the decision.
This criticism was particularly salient because one of those chipmakers, Nvidia, is a major partner and investor in Anthropic.
“The CEOs of these companies are saying, ‘The semiconductor embargo is holding us back,'” Amodei said incredulously in response to a question about the new rules. He warned that this decision would hurt the United States.
“We are years ahead of China in terms of chip manufacturing capabilities,” he told Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief in an interview. “So I think it’s a big mistake to ship these chips.” Amodei then painted an alarming picture of what’s at stake. He spoke of the “incredible national security implications” of AI models that are “inherently cognitive, inherently intelligent.” He likened the future of AI to a “nation of geniuses in a data center” and asked people to imagine “100 million people smarter than any Nobel laureate” under the control of any country.
The image highlighted why he thinks chip exports are so important. But then the biggest blow came. “I think this is crazy,” Amodei said of the administration’s recent moves. “It’s like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. [bragging that] Boeing manufactured the casing. ”
Can you hear me? The Nvidia team keeps shouting into their phones.
Nvidia is more than just a chip company. Anthropic runs on servers from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, but only Nvidia supplies the GPUs that power Anthropic’s AI models (all cloud providers require Nvidia GPUs). Not only is Nvidia at the center of it all, it recently announced it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic.
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Just two months ago, the two companies announced a financial relationship and a “deep technology partnership” with cheerful promises to optimize each other’s technology. Fast forward to Davos, and Amodei compares his partner to an arms dealer.
Maybe it was just a vulnerable moment. It is possible that he was swayed by his own rhetoric and blurted out the analogy. But given Anthropic’s strong position in the AI market, it’s likely that they were comfortable speaking with confidence. The company has raised billions of dollars and is valued in the hundreds of billions, and its Claude Coding Assistant has established a reputation as a much-loved top-tier AI coding tool, especially among developers working on complex real-world projects.
It’s also entirely possible that Anthropic is genuinely afraid of China’s AI labs and wants Washington to take action. If you want to get someone’s attention, nuclear proliferation comparisons are probably a very effective method.
But perhaps most remarkable of all is that Amodei was able to sit on stage at Davos, drop such a bombshell, and walk off to other gatherings without fear of negatively impacting his business. Sure, the news cycle moves on. Anthropic is also now on solid footing. But the AI race is gaining traction in the minds of leaders, who feel that the usual constraints such as investor relations, strategic partnerships, and diplomatic accommodations no longer apply. Amodei doesn’t care about what can and cannot be said. What was most remarkable about what he said on that stage was his fearlessness.
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